The evening is a staircase you have to ascend. No: it is like those tiered gardens you see in the East – whose steps are long and broad, but that take you upward nevertheless. And at the pinnacle – or, better, the plateau? At that point where it spreads out without cease and with no more steps? Then and only then can you give yourself to listening.
Ask yourself, am I ready for Jandek tonight? Ready – is that the word? A state of preparedness, a kind of calm concentration – why is it at concerts that I never feel I achieve it, never feel right for what is about to unfold? For a long time, I avoided them because I never felt ready to listen. And now? Up the stairway of the evening. Nine o’clock; the plateau. I’m ready to listen now. But to what?
In Northern India, raags are written for a time of day, a season. That’s the preparedness: the time, the season. You are brought to the point when a raag might be heard, and by no more than the earth’s elliptical orbit. Brought to it so that the raag might deepen it – might hollow out the season in the season; might discover time within time, unfolding it, opening out its flower.
And Jandek? In the recordings I regard as essential – most of the studio recordings from I Threw You Away onwards, which is to say, those made in the last 5 or 6 years – there is a kind of desolation that must reach you. As though everything were dimmed and reduced to itself. As though the world had contracted, hardened, and was falling in an inward collapse. The rays of the sun burn outwards; but what of an inward ray – what of a ray sent inward, a sun collapsing upon itself? What of darkness falling into darkness and all the way to that terrible void that would draw everything across its horizon?
How terribly concentrated the recordings are! How focused! Sometimes, in the course of a song, a relaxation, a breathing. These are sometimes short, panicked breaths – an animal in a trap; an animal by the side of the road and breathing quickly. Dying, but still breathing, and too fast. Or they can be long breaths, the patient without air, the patient who would gasp air into his lungs, but finds none; or that air is not air enough, that there is never air enough, that breathing cannot find what would sustain it. Long breaths, last ones.
Either way, the songs are sung around death, in its orbit. Around it, close to it, but never close enough for annihilation; there’s never an end. This is a dying-singing. A singing of pain, of absolute pain. That hollows itself from pain, in pain. That quarries pain, adventures in it. Pain learns of itself. Pain learns and sings of itself.
How is it possible to be still alive? How to be alive in pain, still alive? This is the surprise with which Jandek begins on the essential recordings. And what of the less essential ones? Why is Brooklyn Wednesday a little further from me? Why, though I’ve played it 20 times through, all 4 CDs does it remain over there, away from me?
Because when I listen to Jandek – when I’m able to listen, ready for it, I want only the despair, and the variations on despair. Only despair, suffering and pain, and their variations. Only the infinite gradations of pain in pain, the infinitely subtle quest for suffering in suffering, as pain turns in pain, as it awakens and falls to sleep in pain and lives it, as pain is lived and is given life, a body. As pain gives itself a singer to sing of itself. As pain sings of itself, a half-crushed animal by the side of the road.
Am I ready for Jandek, and tonight? Ready to follow the course of an album? Khartoum. The Humility of Pain. The Gone Wait. The Ruins of Adventure. Raining Down Diamonds. I’ve climbed the stairway of the evening. Climbed and at the plateau, nine o’clock, nine bells. To what should I listen?
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